


Well I'm Just a Kid of Ill Repute

by jinlinli



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Percy Jackson Fusion, Alternate Universe - Teenagers, Angst and Humor, First Kiss, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Improvised weapons, M/M, Tony Stark Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-11
Updated: 2018-06-11
Packaged: 2019-05-20 23:04:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14903867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jinlinli/pseuds/jinlinli
Summary: There’s a muffled boom. The ground shudders underneath them, and the dragon screams.“Compressed gas lighter,” the guy says. “If you jack up the intensity of the flame and set it to melting its own casing, when the fire hits the canister, the gas ignites all at once. It packs about the same punch as a quarter stick of dynamite.”Steve stares at him as all around them the world descends into chaos. In the distance, sirens wail as firefighters rush to the scene. The dragon continues to screech in pain.The guy blinks at him and says, “I’m Tony, by the way.”





	Well I'm Just a Kid of Ill Repute

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nikthan](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=nikthan).



> Woo! Honestly this fic combined two of my great loves in life, weaponry jury-rigged from common household items and Greek mythology. 
> 
> Thank you so much to [nikthan](http://nikthan.tumblr.com/) for the amazing art! It was a lot of fun working on this with you! Hope you like the fic!
> 
> And thank you to my friend, Jess, for betaing this fic for me! I know you normally don't beta fic, but you were such a good sport for giving this a read for me!

 

Steve is maybe a tiny bit screwed. Maybe a lot.

There’s a giant scaly monster blocking off the entrance of the alleyway. He’d call it a dragon what with the teeth and the claws and the hissing and the goddamn wings, but dragons aren’t real. It’s a mutant snake or something. It’s Steve’s brain going wonky and conjuring up monsters where there shouldn’t be. But this not-dragon most definitely _seems_ real, and he might be very very dead soon.

Fuck.

The teeth and the angry yellow-eyed glare really don’t bode well for his chances. Steve swings his book bag at the monster, causing it to stagger a little. The impact jars his arm, and yup, undeniably real. And he’s definitely pissed it off even more.

Well, if Steve’s gonna die here, he’s not going down without a fight. He adjusts his grip on his bag, thankful that he’d needed to bring three textbooks to class today. The monster’s tail twitches back and forth as it sinks down on its haunches. Readying itself for its next attack.

Steve takes a breath.

The monster lunges, and he slams his bag into its neck. It reels back and retreats back to the mouth of the alley, keening angrily at him. Steve exhales. He’d gotten two solid hits in, but he doesn’t have any illusions about his chances. He hasn’t really done much more than irritate the monster, and he can only last so long like this. Eventually, he’s gonna get tired. Eventually, he’ll slip up.

“Need a hand?” a voice says from above him. He looks up, and there’s a guy his age leaning against the railing of the fire escape.

“You need to get out of here,” Steve shouts. “Run aw—” he jumps back, narrowly dodging the snapping jaws of the monster.

There’s a muted pop and a bright flash, and it screams, rearing away from him and retreating once more to the mouth of the alley. There, it shudders and twists itself into coils. The guy is suddenly in front of him. He grabs Steve’s arm and drags him to the fire escape where the ladder had been released sometime during the commotion.

They make it up just before the monster recovers and springs forward again, raking its claws against the brick facade of the building. Steve slumps back against the railing. The guy peers down at the monster stalking back and forth below.

“Nasty fuckers, dragons,” he says. “You okay?”

“What did you do to that—thing?”

The guy rolls his eyes. “Like I said, dragons. Ugly as hell, so probably one of Echidna’s.” He turns back from the railing and starts to rummage through a duffel bag pushed up against the staircase. “Her kids tend to be skittish around lightning. The dad’s a storm-giant who likes to eat his weaker offspring, so a light show and a few hundred volts of electricity is enough to scare them off for a while.”

Steve blinks at him. “I—what?”

The guy sends him a sidelong look. “Well, you’re definitely not one of Athena’s,” he drawls, holding up a spring with a grey object lodged into it, and a disposable camera with wires and two small screws sticking out. “This is the flint and spring of a lighter.” He digs out another lighter from his pocket and heats the flint over the flame before hurling it down at the dragon. There’s another burst of light. The dragon flinches back, hissing. “Decent flash bangs in a pinch.”

He waves the disposable camera at Steve. “Disposable cameras have capacitors that produce around 380 volts to power the flash. Not nearly as much as a standard taser, but with a bit of rewiring, it’s enough of a shock to freak out an electricity-phobic dragon. Do you have any gum?”

Steve blinks. “No?”

“Ugh, I’m on my last pack, and I’ve only got one lighter left.”

And that has to be one of the most bizarre sentences in what’s already the strangest conversation Steve’s ever had in his life. The dragon claws at the ladder, causing the fire escape rattles underneath their feet. “Do you really need to chew gum _now?_ We kind of have more important things to worry about, like I dunno, _getting out of here._ ”

“That’s what I’m _working_ on,” the guy snaps. “The windows are barred, and the fire escape doesn’t go up to the roof. The only way out is through there.” He points at the mouth of the alley where the dragon’s glaring up at them. “Anyway, I’m about to fuck up my only lighter, so we’re going to need a second source of fire.”

He pulls out a AA battery, duct tape, scissors, pliers, and a tannish lump of _something_ wrapped in foil from the duffel bag. And then a strip of gum from his pocket. Steve watches him fiddle around with his lighter using the pliers, then tape something down with a bit of duct tape.

When he’s satisfied, he sets it aside and unwraps the gum. “Want some?” he asks as he holds the strip out to Steve.

“Uh, no?”

The guy shrugs and pops the gum into his mouth, chewing merrily as he cuts the foil-backed wrapper into a thin strip. Then he rubs the blade of the scissors against his jeans, collecting the denim fluff that gets shaved off. He smacks the gum in his mouth and says, “Okay, we’ve got our exit strategy. There’s about to be a shit ton of smoke, and you’re gonna run like hell. We’re going to want to be very far away from here very quickly. You ready?”

Steve nods. The guy piles the denim fluff on top of the tan foil-wrapped lump, then he touches the ends of the gum wrapper to the terminals of the battery. The paper side of the wrapper catches fire, and he quickly holds it against the denim fluff. An improvised fire starter and tinder, Steve realizes. The flame spreads to the tan lump, and huge amounts of smoke starts to billow off of it. The guy tosses his makeshift smoke bomb into the alleyway, flicks the striker wheel of the modified lighter until it ignites, then tosses that down too.

“Go! Now!” he yells, and they both vault over the railing of the fire escape.

Steve staggers when he hits the ground, his teeth jarring at the impact, and the guy grabs his elbow and hauls him into a dead sprint. Somewhere in the smoky alley, the dragon roars its confusion. Its swinging tail misses hitting them by bare inches. And then, they’re stumbling out into the open street, coughing and sputtering and still running.

“ _Keep going_ ,” the boy hisses to Steve when he starts to slow down.

They don’t stop until they’re a few blocks away. Steve rests his hands on his knees and gasps for breath while the guy slumps against a light post. A few passing pedestrians give them weird looks.

“What—” Steve manages to pant out, “—the hell was that?”

“Most tree stump removal products are basically pure powdered potassium nitrate. Heat that with granulated sugar over a hot plate, and you get,” the guy gestures vaguely to the plume of smoke, visible even from here, “that.”

“And why did we have to run?”

There’s a muffled boom. The ground shudders underneath them, and the dragon screams.

“Compressed gas lighter,” the guy says. “If you jack up the intensity of the flame and set it to melting its own casing, when the fire hits the canister, the gas ignites all at once. It packs about the same punch as a quarter stick of dynamite.”

Steve stares at him as all around them the world descends into chaos. In the distance, sirens wail as firefighters rush to the scene. The dragon continues to screech in pain.

The guy blinks at him and says, “I’m Tony, by the way.”

 

* * *

They end up in a kitschy 1950s style diner that’s mostly empty. The waitress takes one look at their general state of griminess and dishevelment, and sticks them in a booth towards the back. Steve’s grateful for it because the exhaustion hits like a truck the moment the adrenaline wears off. This has been the weirdest and most terrifying day of his life, and the dragon wasn’t even the strangest part of it.

It was the fact that just a few hours ago, Bucky Barnes had appeared at his school and dragged him out of class. Bucky Barnes who was supposed to be _dead_. He’d disappeared like six years ago, and all that was left was his house and his mom. The first had been completely trashed, and the second had been killed. Daytime robbery gone wrong, the news reports had said after.

Steve had _mourned_ him. He even visits his empty casket every year. And suddenly, Bucky’s back from the dead, holding a goddamn sword of all things, babbling on and on about Greek gods and keeping Steve safe. And then he’s gone again, luring the first snake monster— _dragon_ —away from Steve because of course this day would have to have _two_ dragons in it. This feels suspiciously like the start of a mental breakdown.

“What the hell is going on?” he demands.

Tony groans. He’s slumped forward against the table, using his duffel for a pillow. He looks just as wiped as Steve feels. “Gods, I hate explaining shit to newbies. Why didn’t you have a protector with you? Or a searcher. The satyrs are usually better about keeping track of demigods. They should be the ones telling you this stuff.”

Steve stares at Tony for a moment. He hadn’t understood half of the stuff that just came out of his mouth, and it’s obvious that Tony knows it and is annoyed by it. Now that he’s not moving, the guy almost seems—smaller. He’s certainly shorter than Steve, but he hadn’t seemed like it with how confidently he seemed to control the situation. He’s built more compact than anything else. Wiry. His hair is unruly, his clothes rumpled, lending him an almost manic appearance.

If Steve hadn’t seen just how effective he is, he would’ve been easy to underestimate. He wouldn’t have looked long enough to see the sharp intelligence in his eyes.

“A protector?” Steve frowns. “You mean, Bucky?”

That gets Tony’s attention. He leans almost all the way across the table until he’s in Steve’s face. “Barnes? Barnes went to find you?”

“Yeah, he just randomly showed up and dragged me away. He kept talking about demigods and monsters and—” he trails off when he sees the expression on Tony’s face.

“ _Shit_. I knew he went out looking for an old friend, but—” Tony breaks off, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “What happened to him?”

“There was another dragon, he told me to hide while he distracted it. And then the second dragon showed up.”

Tony leans back, frowning. “A dragon? Are you sure it was a dragon?”

“It was scaly? It had a bunch of heads, but they kinda looked the same.”

“How many heads?”

Steve’s starting to get a little panicked himself. Because there’s something really awful in the way Tony’s face gets tenser and tenser. “I don’t know? Maybe a dozen? They were all moving, and I wasn’t really counting. There were at least six.”

“About nine heads, you’d say?”

Steve nods.

Tony groans “A hydra. Barnes went off and fought a fucking hydra _by himself_.”

Steve clenches his fists in his lap. He’d only _just_ gotten Bucky back. He hasn’t seen the guy in ages, but he still misses him like hell. “But he can get out alright. I mean, you killed that dragon by yourself.”

“Hydras are a whole different story from dragons. We were only dealing with one head first of all, and second, hydras have a nasty habit of growing new heads when you chop them off. They’re the sort of monsters that only a group can hope to take down. No one in their right mind fights them alone.” Tony ticks the list off on his fingers as he talks. “And lastly, I didn’t kill the dragon. I rattled it, got it angry, and if we’re lucky, blew a few scales off its ugly hide. But I definitely didn’t kill it. Without any celestial bronze on hand, there’s not much I can do but stun it.”

And Bucky’s taking all of that on _alone_. “We need to find him,” Steve says.

“Oh, go ahead. If you want to get us both killed, that’s a great idea,” Tony drawls. “What we need to do is get backup. Hell, a fucking strike team. And I need you,” he points at Steve, “to not be underfoot.”

“I’m not just going to—”

“You’re unprepared, untrained, and you don’t know jack shit about _anything_. We don’t even know where to _begin_ to look for Barnes, and he’s even more screwed if we find him and go in half-cocked. We’re getting help.”

“You think I don’t know just how fucking in over my head I am. I almost got killed by a freaking _dragon_. But Bucky’s my friend, and we can’t just leave him to die alone. The more time we waste, the less likely he’ll survive,” Steve snarls.

“Which is why we need to go back to camp _now_ ,” Tony snaps back. He dumps a fistful of cash onto the table and stands abruptly. “And you’re coming with me. Barnes wouldn’t even be out here if it weren’t for you,” he pauses, his voice softening almost imperceptibly when he says, “and I’m not letting you run off and get yourself killed.”

 _‘I can’t let him die for nothing’_ seems to be the silent message.

Tony stares at him levelly until Steve groans but silently stands up and follows him out of the diner. “What the hell even is this camp?”

He groans. “Oh my god, you really don’t know anything. Camp Half-Blood, overall safe haven for demigods, generally shitty place for dragons, manticores, etc. It’s where monster chow like us hide out over the summer.” He casts a narrow-eyed glance at Steve. “Honestly, I’m surprised you’ve managed to stay off their radar this long. Usually we start running into problems at around middle school.”

“Yeah, because I’m not a demigod.”

Tony rolls his eyes as he slows to a stop next to one of the cars parked behind the diner. He eyes it critically for a second before digging a wooden doorstop and a thin rod out of his bag. He jams the wedge into the seam between the car door and the frame, levering it up just enough for him to slip the rod through the opening. There’s the tell-tale click of the door when he hits the unlock button. Tony slips into the driver’s seat and starts hot wiring the car.

“You _just_ ran into two monsters in one day. You could stand to be a little more open-minded,” he says as he works. “And oh let me guess, mysterious absentee parent, history of dyslexia, good reflexes, poor impulse control. Hey, and I bet you saw a slew of ‘imaginary’ creatures when you were a kid. Maybe an overzealous shrink saddled you with an ADHD diagnosis.” He nods at Steve’s startled exhalation. “Thought so. Once you know the fact pattern, we’re scarily easy to pick out.”

Steve goes silent as he tries to sort through all of that. Tony ignores him and keeps fiddling around with the wires, stripping the insulation off the ends with his teeth. It’s _a lot_. The fact that a total stranger could recite details of his personal history like it’s somehow normal. Like it all obviously points to some bizarre magical heritage. It’s all dizzyingly surreal. He’s seen both a dragon and a hydra in less than an hour, and now he’s just watching a guy steal a car.

Tony makes a triumphant noise as the engine grumbles to life. “Get in the car,” he says and then sees the expression on Steve’s face. “Gods, can we do this crisis thing _after_ we get back to camp?” he says as he herds Steve to the passenger door. “So what, you’re a half-blood, and oh hey, you’re statistically about three times more likely to die before adulthood. But right now, we’re two _unarmed_ _half-bloods out in the open_ which makes us about eleven times more likely to die. So we _really_ need to get moving.”

Steve is about to argue more, but then he notices Tony’s hands. How they tap a staccato rhythm against his leg. He’s nervous. His eyes flick over every shadow and corner for possible threats, and his shoulders are hunched up, tensed. It’s almost unimaginable that someone like this could be this afraid with how easily he’d taken down the dragon earlier with only a bag of junk.

Steve glances around the street, half-expecting to see a monster lurking in the shadows. He can’t take on the hydra alone, and there’s no way he can convince Tony to come with him now. And Tony _did_ say they’re getting help.

“Okay,” Steve says and gets into the car.

“ _Finally._ ” Tony jumps into the drivers seat, slings his bag into the backseat, and pulls out of the parking lot. The engine rumbles steadily as they begin to make their way north.

 

* * *

 

It’s night by the time they reach their destination, which is apparently all the way up in Montauk on the Long Island Sound. For the past half hour, it’s been almost nothing but the single stretch of road and the scraggly trees hemming it in. Tony alternates between sudden rambling monologues and a pensive watchful silence that sets Steve’s teeth on edge. The further they get from the city and then from the surrounding towns, the more the tension unwinds from his shoulders. But Tony never fully relaxes until they pull onto a side road and crest a hill with a lone pine tree.

Steve can’t see much of the valley in the dark except for the lights of a farmhouse about half a mile away surrounded by other points of light from a dozen or so smaller buildings. Tony drives all the way up to the farmhouse where a group of people wait on the porch.

A man in a wheelchair and an eyepatch is in front. He has the no-nonsense look of a veteran, and he’s the one who speaks up when Tony slides out of the front seat. “Stark, we agreed you weren’t going to make a habit of stealing cars.”

“It was an emergency, and you only said that because I was fifteen then. And hey,” Tony flicks a thin card out of his pocket, “I have my license now.”

The man pinches the bridge of his nose. “No, I said that because I can’t have you on a federal watch list because you hacked the database to neaten up your goddamn arrest record.”

“I’m not gonna end up on a watch list,” Tony says, rolling his eyes. “I wouldn’t leave footprints if I broke past their firewall.”

Steve walks around the hood of the car and eyes the group dubiously. “You said there’d be a strike team here,” he says to Tony. Aside from the man in the wheelchair, most of them are kids around his age wearing bright orange T-shirts with the camp name and logo. None of them look like they’re any more fit for fighting monsters than him or Tony.

“I said there’d be _help_ ,” he shoots back. “We need a questing group ASAP. Maybe creepy corpse lady in the attic can spit out a prophecy for us to make it legit. Barnes got himself nabbed by a hydra.”

The group murmurs uneasily when they hear that, and the man’s expression tightens. “What the hell was Barnes doing off grounds?”

“You mean, he didn’t—” Tony pauses and then groans. “Of course he didn’t get approval. The guy’s got trust issues a mile wide.” He jerks a finger at Steve. “Barnes went looking for Tall, Blond, and Grumpy here. They’re childhood friends or something, and he apparently didn’t realize this guy was a half-blood until just recently. Then he freaked the fuck out and decided he needed to find him. Apparently _without_ telling anyone but the people who happened to be in immediate earshot when he had his little revelation.”

“He should know better than to go haring off by himself given his history,” the man says. His face just keeps getting grimmer and grimmer.

“Yeah, so quest group—we need it. Now.”

Steve glances around the assembled people as the man sharply turns his chair and starts barking orders at the group. A few people run off into the night to a cluster of buildings a little ways away, and some others disappear into the farmhouse itself. He turns to Tony and asks the question that’s been bothering him the entire day. “How do we know he isn’t dead?”

“Because,” Tony says bleakly, “the first time we stumbled across him, he was in the hands of monsters, and they were very much intent on keeping him alive.”

The statement chills Steve down to the very bone. “What did they want with him?”

“Not sure, but we have some theories. None of them are very—nice.”

Steve’s about to press further when the man in the wheelchair pins him down with a glare. “You,” he says. “How much did Barnes and Stark explain to you.”

“That monsters exist, this is some sort of safe haven, and I’m apparently some god’s kid?”

The man rounds on Tony with a growl. “Stark, you’re the head of a goddamn cabin. How are you so fucking _bad_ at this?”

“Hey, in my defense, I usually have Pepper explain stuff to newbies,” Tony says, backing up a step with both hands in the air. He looks completely unrepentant.

“Pepper isn’t even in your cabin.”

“Yeah, cabin six. Athena kid, which means she’s smart enough to do a good job.”

“Stark, do your fucking duties, or I’m making Hammer head counselor instead.”

Tony snorts. “You won’t. Justin’s so freaking incompetent, it’s laughable.”

The man looks like he wants to argue further but then decides against it. Maybe to preserve his sanity. Steve’s known Tony for less than a day, and even he knows no one really wins in an argument with him. The man looks at Steve and asks, “What’s your name?”

“Steve Rogers, sir.”

The honorific seems to appease the man a little. “You seem like you have some semblance of common sense, Rogers. And because Stark did such a terrible job at explaining everything, let me just make a few things clear.” He raises a finger. “One, the Olympian gods are and always have been real. Two, the same goes for all the creatures of Greek mythology. Three, most mortals don’t know this because their perception of us is obscured and altered by Hecate. Four, this is a safe place for the children of the gods.”

“So which god is your parent then?” Steve asks.

The corner of the man’s mouth twitches up. “Not quite,” he says and starts to stand up. Except his legs don’t move when he does. He keeps growing taller and taller, and then the body of a horse is stepping out of the impossibly small wheelchair. It’s the strangest thing he’s ever seen. “Amongst mortals, my name is Nick Fury,” the man—no, the _centaur_ —says. “Here, I’m known as Chiron. Welcome to Camp Half-Blood, Rogers.”

 

* * *

 

Apparently it’s too late at night to send anyone out to find Bucky, so Steve ends up staying the night in an over-crowded cabin. Most of the other kids are sleeping by the time he gets there, and he’s so exhausted that he just ends up passing out fully clothed on the first empty bed he sees. Seven hours later, he wakes to the sight of Tony standing over him with a very annoyed expression on his face.

“What?” he mumbles, still half-asleep.

“Fury’s pissed that I’ve apparently been neglecting the newbies. I’m supposed to give you the grand tour, so get moving.”

“A tour?” Steve frowns and sits up. “We’re supposed to be going out to find Bucky.”

Tony huffs out a groan. “Oh my gods, _we_ are not. A group of people who are much more well-organized and weapons-adept than us are going to be doing that while I’m stuck here showing you the strawberry fields.” He dumps a pair of jeans and a familiar bright orange shirt into Steve’s lap. “Put this on. I really don’t have the time for this, so let’s get this over with.”

That pretty much sets the tone for the entire day.

The overall camp is actually pretty nice. There’s not a cloud in the sky, and the day is pleasantly warm, so there are quite a few campers out and about. Tony does show him the strawberry fields where there are a few kids picking and eating fruit straight from the stem. There’s a volleyball court, an arts and crafts area, a lake with canoe paddlers in it, and even a rock climbing wall. It’s like a normal summer camp, aside from the fact that there are goat-men wandering around, a lot of the kids have swords and spears, and the rock climbing wall is on fire.

But Tony doesn’t seem to think any of it is worth commenting on, and instead seems to be intent on getting the tour over with as quickly as possible. Tony explains things a little, but he mostly seems concerned with ensuring Steve doesn’t have the chance to really take a look at anything. He thought that Tony would be more relaxed within the safety of the camp borders, but if anything, he seems even more keyed up than yesterday.

Steve finally snaps when Tony doesn’t even let him take a moment to look at the actual _pegasus stable_. “Okay, why the hell are you in such a hurry?”

Tony shrugs. “I’ve got a lot going on. Projects to work on and stuff.” He slings his hands into his pockets and shifts his weight from one foot to another. “Fury really couldn’t have picked a busier guy to—oh hey, Romanoff! You look like you’ve got some free time.”

The girl he called out to slows to a stop and arches an eyebrow at them. She has an unnerving number of knives strapped to her belt. “Don’t even try, Stark. Fury’s shut down the armory for the day so you won’t skip out on the newbie. You might as well help him.”

Tony groans. “Do you have any idea how many important projects we’re working on?”

“None of them are time sensitive, so deal with it.” The girl’s eyes flick to Steve. “I’m Natasha, head counselor of cabin five. That’s where the Ares kids go.” She gives him a glance over, quick and appraising. “You look like a good guy. Strong moral compass. Hope you’re one of ours.”

Then she pivots on her heel and walks away. Steve eyes her as she starts talking to another girl holding a bow. “That was weirdly specific,” he comments.

Tony nods his head in the direction of one of the smaller buildings. It looks like there’s blood on the mantle that someone had tried to scrub off but didn’t quite get all of it. “The last head was pretty ruthless,” he says, “and the whole cabin ended up with a nasty rep. Romanoff’s been trying to clean up their image.”

“Wow, that was actually useful information.”

Tony starts to walk towards the clustered cabins behind the farmhouse. “Don’t get used to it. Fury’s basically put my entire cabin on lock down, so there’s no way we can get anything actually useful done today. I might as well help you a little. Let’s see if we can figure out who your parent is.”

Steve follows him and peers around. “Does it really make much of a difference knowing?” he asks. “I spent most of my life thinking he was dead.”

“Oh, you’ll definitely want to know,” Tony says with a snort. “Mostly because it’s good to know when you’re trying to figure out what affinities and abilities you can tap into. But _you_ specifically will want to know because there’s no way in hell Fury’s going to let an unclaimed half-blood off property. The sooner you figure out who your godly parent is, the sooner you can run off and get yourself killed looking for Barnes.” He pauses and eyes Steve speculatively. “You said he, so it’s your dad. That narrows it down to about five possibilities.”

“There are more than five male Olympians.”

“Yeah, but let’s be real, you’re not one of the Big Three’s kids. They made a pact decades ago not to mess around with mortal women because their kids tend to be like super destructive. Barnes was actually the first Big Three kid we’ve come across in years, and let me tell you, we were _all_ surprised it was Hades who broke the pact first. Zeus kinda has a hard time keeping it in his pants.”

“Bucky’s dad is literally Hades,” Steve says. And that’s probably the weirdest sentence he’s ever said in his life. “Then who’s your godly parent?”

“Hephaestus. Some of his kids get lucky enough to inherit an immunity to fire, but for me, it basically means I’m good at building stuff.”

They walk past a few cabins that look to be completely empty. Two of them are built from marble, one looks like a coral reef is growing out of it, and the last is built out of some dark stone with a skull on the lintel. Tony identifies them as the cabins for the children of Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, and Hades. They slow to a stop in front of a cabin that looks like it’s made out of solid gold.

“You know you might be an Apollo kid. What with the—” Tony gestures vaguely at Steve, “—blond hair and personality difficulties.”

They watch a blond guy gesture furiously at another girl in sign language, pick up his bow, and shake it threateningly at her. She laughs at him when he trips and nearly impales himself on his own arrow.

“Personality difficulties,” Steve repeats.

“Yeah, that’s the head counselor, Clint. I think you’ll be able to fit right in. How good are you at archery?”

“Terrible.”

“Shame,” Tony says, and they move on.

The next cabin over is an understated building built from gray stone. A red-headed girl catches sight of them and waves them over.

“You must be Steve,” she says and holds her hand out for him to shake. Her grip is surprisingly firm. “I’m Pepper Potts, head of Athena’s cabin.”

“Pepper, how about—” Tony starts to say as he sidles up to her.

She rounds on him, getting right up in his face. “What on earth do you think you were doing unarmed off grounds? Not even a celestial bronze _hairpin?_ ”

“Testing a hypothesis,” Tony says, sliding a step back but otherwise looking utterly unfazed.

“Gods, I’m not going to like this, am I?”

Tony smirks and says, “Did you know Barnes has been running a lot more quests recently?”

Pepper nods. “Yeah, Fury finally gave him the authorization.”

“Well, it was pretty standard at first. Meaning overall very shitty for him because monsters like to munch on powerful demigods until—” Tony raises a finger, pausing dramatically for effect, and Steve rolls his eyes, “he got his hands on a Stygian iron sword from his old man. And interestingly enough, the number of monster encounters dropped off _dramatically_.” He gestures expansively. “So unarmed hypothesis, it needed testing.”

There’s a thought niggling at the back of Steve’s head. “But you weren’t unarmed,” he says with a frown. “You came completely prepared. You had a duffle filled with things you could use to take out monsters. The only thing you didn’t have on you was—” he tilts his head, trying to remember what Tony had said the day before, “—celestial bronze? You said it was the only thing that could kill monsters. But you didn’t have it with you because you wanted to see if you’d run into less monsters—if it was somehow drawing them towards you?”

Tony stops and turns to send an assessing look at him. “That was surprisingly perceptive of you.”

“And I thought you were smarter,” Steve says back. “It would’ve made more sense if the Stygian iron sword was blocking the monsters’ ability to find him. Instead, you just randomly decide that it obviously means celestial bronze is making you easier to find or whatever.”

Tony rolls his eyes. “Well, I don’t exactly have any Stygian iron lying around. It’s kind of a pain-in-the-ass material to find. If I test the No Celestial Bronze hypothesis and it’s wrong, then I can conclude that it’s some external cause. For example, Stygian iron projecting a protective aura, or maybe Barnes is so shit terrifying, no sane monster wants to go toe-to-toe with him.” He frowns. “Which now that I think about it, that could also be a factor.”

Steve arches an eyebrow. “So did you prove your theory right?”

“No fucking clue since _somebody_ completely screwed up my results by charging in with a goddamned dragon on his heels.”

“How on earth is that _my_ fault?”

Tony crosses his arms, glaring at him. “ _Somehow_ it is,” he growls. “Because you make no fucking sense. You spend what, the last sixteen years flying completely under the radar. No monster attacks, and not even the satyrs pick up on your presence because we didn’t even know you _existed_ until Barnes goes looking for you. That all points to you being the kid of one of the less powerful Olympians, hell maybe even a minor god.”

He takes a step closer into Steve’s space. His hand comes up to jab accusingly as he continues, “But then the moment Barnes runs into you, you attract _two_ major monsters in less than an hour. Before you showed up, Barnes has only been running into like ornery wind spirits and the occasional harpy for almost a year. That’s the kind of shit a child of one of the—” Tony cuts off abruptly and stares at Steve with a considering look on his face. “Huh, never mind.”

“You deliberately left camp unarmed just to see if a monster is _slightly_ less likely to kill you?” Pepper cuts in with an exasperated expression on her face. “I don’t even know what I expected at this point.”

“Obviously not slightly,” Tony says, rolling his eyes. “I was going for the probability of a true null hypothesis being less than five percent. You know, statistically significant enough to be worth taking into account.”

A voice pipes up from above them, and they all look up to see a kid a few years younger than them hanging off the side of the cabin roof. “I don’t think you can draw any conclusive results about anything with a sample size of one and only a single experiment with uncontrolled variables.”

“Thank you, Peter. Which is why—”

“You are _not_ sending out more unarmed campers for the sake of dodgy statistics,” Pepper says. Both Tony and Peter start grumbling at the injustice. “Besides, you still have to help Steve figure out who his godly parent is.”

That seems to divert Tony’s attention, and he immediately turns to Steve with a gleam in his eye. There’s a wily smile slowly spreading on his face. “You’re _absolutely right_ , Pepper. Why didn’t I think of that?” he says. “I’ll get on that ASAP. Come with me, Rogers.”

Steve gets the sense that it’s going to be a long day.

 

* * *

 

Tony leads Steve to a stout brick building with a chimney spitting out smoke. It has a pragmatic industrial look to it, unlike the more traditional wooden cabins. “Home sweet home,” Tony says as they slip through the open door.

Steve glances around curiously. This is the first cabin he’s been in aside from the one he stayed in the night before. Cabin eleven, he thinks. It was all wood, peeling paint, and bunkbeds. It looked the most similar to what he imagined a summer camp cabin would look like. The counselor, an older prematurely balding kid named Phil, had explained that Hermes is the patron of travelers. It’s where all the undetermined half-bloods stay before they’re claimed by their godly parent.

On the other hand, Hephaestus cabin looks like a steampunk fever dream. It’s full of moving metal gears and pipes hissing steam, and every horizontal surface is cluttered with power tools and half-finished machines. Tony leads Steve to a steel bunk at the far end of the room and plops down onto the mattress. “Sit,” he says, patting the space next to him.

Steve eyes him dubiously. “Why?”

Tony rolls his eyes. “Because I’m going to inflict grievous injury on you obviously. Just sit.”

Steve gingerly perches on the edge of the bed and watches as Tony pulls his booted feet up onto the mattress and kicks a button on the headboard. There’s a screech of metal and then the bed starts to sink down into the floor. Steve flinches and quickly yanks his feet onto the bed, and Tony snickers. The bed keeps descending until they’re in a small underground room. The walls are covered in blueprints and schematics, and there’s several different projects scattered throughout.

Tony hops off the bed and picks up a gauntlet made from some glowing bronze looking metal. “There’s a pretty significant amount of basement space underneath Cabin Nine,” he explains. “Hephaestus kids have been excavating and expanding it for decades. Most of the bunks are connected to private workspaces underground.” Then he slings himself into a desk chair and starts to fiddle around with the gauntlet.

A couple minutes pass in silence before Steve sighs and says, “You’re not going to help me find my godly parent are you.”

“Course I am,” Tony says absent-mindedly as he pulls on a pair of heavy rubber gloves. He connects a couple of alligator clips to a terminal. “Feeling a particular affinity to this place? Any tingling or sudden urges to build an android of dubious sentience?”

“I think we both know I’m not a Hephaestus kid,” Steve says dryly.

“Hey, gotta be thorough.” Tony rolls his chair to the other side of the room and snatches up a small glowing device. “Hold this for me,” he says, tossing it at Steve’s head.

He catches it and immediately feels a strange shiver pass through him. “Well, _that_ tingled.” The device is almost pretty in its own way. It has some sort of internal light shining from between a slender metal framework. There’s a couple wires sticking out of it, as if it should be hooked up to something. He doesn’t have the slightest clue what it does. Steve turns it over in his hand, noting the odd prickling against his skin when he touches certain parts of it.

It’s not really unpleasant feeling, but it’s still weird. He’s pretty sure Tony wouldn’t seriously hurt him on purpose, if only because it’d be too much of a hassle to deal with the fallout after. But just to be sure, he asks “What is this?”

Tony doesn’t respond immediately. In fact, he’s been uncharacteristically silent, and Steve looks up to see that he’s staring at him with an unreadable expression on his face. His eyes keep flicking between the little device and Steve’s face like he’s assimilating a new piece of information.

“What?” Steve asks.

“Nothing,” Tony says and beckons him over. He connects the device’s wires to the terminal he’d been messing around with earlier. The tingling sensation grows stronger. Then he picks up the gauntlet again, except it’s not a gauntlet, Steve realizes. The way the construction is just a little too slim for a hand to fit inside, the articulation of the joints, and the sheer amount of mechanisms that seem to be built in—it’s a prosthetic. A highly advanced prosthetic with potentially all the precision and versatility of a person’s real hand.

There’s a little circular hole set into the palm of the hand about the size of the glowing device. Tony holds the prosthetic out to him and taps the edge of it, saying, “Okay, stick that in here for me, would you?”

Steve eyes him for a moment before deciding it’s really not worth the effort to argue over something so small. He tries to slot the device into the hole, and it takes some careful fiddling around before he can finally push it all the way in. The light flares, and Steve feels another wave of that prickling feeling. It’s almost like the way static crackles on his skin when he’s wearing wool on a cold day. The prosthetic hums with power, causing the air around it to almost ripple and warp.

Steve takes a step back. Tony looks completely unconcerned by the fact that it seems to be literally bending the fabric of reality around it. He just watches it with a mixture of boredom and mild curiosity.

“What the—” Steve starts to say but cuts off with surprise when the distortion in the air starts to settle enough for him to see the prosthetic clearly. Because the thing Tony’s holding now looks _exactly_ like a human hand. The bronze metallic color and the mechanical joints have disappeared. In their place, there’s skin and muscles and veins and _fingernails_. There’s even a light dusting of hair on the knuckles.

The little glowing device is still set into the palm. Tony detaches the wires connecting it to the terminal. The skin around the device ripples and smooths over until there’s nothing but skin.

“Well, would you look at that,” Tony murmurs as he examines his handiwork. The usual customary smirk and swagger he wears like a second skin is strangely absent. He gently runs his fingers over the hand, and there’s a soft, almost awed expression on his face.

“What—what was that?” Steve asks warily.

Tony rolls his eyes. “Oh, don’t give me that look. You just plugged in a battery.” He waves the hand a bit, and it flops around, disturbingly limp. “This only _looks_ like a severed hand. It’s still all machinery underneath.” He taps on the palm, and for a moment, the air around the hand shivers a little, flickering back and forth between the metal prosthetic and the flesh-and-blood hand.

Steve stares at the prosthetic, at a machine so hyper realistic that no one would even notice you were wearing it. Then he looks all around the little workroom. There’s a metal leg leaning up against the far wall, a few more hands and arms in various stages of completion, and even something that looks a lot like a pair of mechanical lungs on one of the tables.

And that’s when it really hits home just how dangerous the life of a half-blood must be. He’d barely scraped out of the encounter with the dragon alive, and if that sort of thing happened with any sort of regularity…

“People like us get hurt a lot, don’t we,” Steve says, staring at the prosthetic. “And not just minor things. Debilitating injuries. We die young. You mentioned it earlier. We’re three times less likely to live to adulthood.”

Tony looks up from where he’s testing the flexibility of the joints. “This isn’t exactly an easy life,” he says quietly. “Sure, we’re hardier. Stronger, faster, tougher. We’re made for combat. It’s why so many of us get diagnosed with ADHD. All those battlefield instincts locked up inside with nothing to do. We were never built for peacetime.” He ducks his head back down to look at the prosthetic cradled in his hands. “It means we can live through more than most. Take more hits. Survive things that would kill normal people. But there are a lot of things out there trying to kill us, and eventually you’re gonna run into something there’s just no bouncing back from. All the healing mojo of Apollo’s cabin can’t fix a leg torn off by a chimera’s claws.”

“So prosthetics.”

“Yeah, pretty much. And a lot of the kids here, they’ve got lives outside this place. Sure, there are year-rounders if they’ve got nowhere else to go. But for a lot of campers, they’re only here over the summer. They’ve got families to go back to, friends, school, a whole life. And well, even if something happens, they should still get to have that.” Tony lifts the prosthetic and that almost gentle look is back on his face. It could even be called wistful. “A normal life. It’s worth a lot more than you’d think.”

 

* * *

 

It’s a lot to absorb, Steve thinks as he lies awake in bed that night.

Tony is an asshole. He’s infuriatingly cocky and sarcastic, and he carries himself with the arrogance of someone who always thinks he’s the smartest person in the room. The worst part is that it’s often true. He acts as if the rules don’t apply to him. He doesn’t care if he’s treading over the sensibilities of other people.

But he’s also…more than he seems to be. He’s more than he allows people to see. Steve gets the sense that moments of honesty like he just saw are rare. Seeing the completion of the prosthetic must’ve lowered Tony’s guard in a way that he doesn’t usually allow. He seems like the kind of guy who places his trust in machines, not people.

Still, he does care about people—that much is obvious. He builds prosthetics in his spare time, and he goes out on solo missions to test his theories because it’s too dangerous for everyone else. He saved Steve’s life. Even if he wishes Tony hadn’t forced them to retreat, he still has to respect that he cared enough about a stranger to jump right into the fray and save both of their skins. He’s sharp and caustic, and he also cares about the tiny scraps of normalcy the other campers still have in their lives.

It all comes together to form a person Steve may never fully like or agree with. Someone who doesn’t bother with the niceties. Someone who cares about people in the specific but not in general. Someone he can certainly respect. But well, Steve supposes it doesn’t really matter at this point.

He sits up, careful not to disturb the sleeping campers in the beds beside him. The only clothes that’d been given to him were the garish orange T-shirts. Steve had wondered why the camp would pick such an eye-catching color when its campers were supposed to be hiding from monsters, but now he has an idea why. Because it’s really hard to sneak off grounds wearing bright orange.

Steve eases out of his bed, pads over to his backpack, and pulls out the flannel he arrived in. He tugs it on to cover the colorful camp shirt, slinging his bag over his shoulder. No one stirs or notices him quietly slipping out the cabin door. The night air is cool against his skin, and all is silent except for the crunch of gravel underneath his feet as he walks. The armory is only a slight detour from the entrance of the camp. There’s all sorts of spears and swords and hammers neatly lined up, even what looks like a prototype blaster.

Steve stares at the sheer multitude of lethal weapons and feels a sick uneasy feeling crawl under his skin. He’s not—for Christ’s sake, he’s just a _kid_. They’re all just kids. And Tony kept talking on and on like everyone’s this special breed of super soldiers fighting an endless war, but Steve isn’t that.

Maybe Tony’s right and Steve’s just deluding himself, but he can’t just straight-up grab a spear and start stabbing people. He sighs and walks to where a dusty bronze shield had been kicked into the corner. The heft of it on his arm feels surprisingly natural. Steve lifts it up and wipes some of the grime off the surface with his sleeve. This will have to do, he thinks.

He starts on a brisk jog out of the armory and to the base of the hill with the lone pine. The shield jostles a little as he runs, but he learns to adjust for the added weight surprisingly quickly. His body seems to instinctively understand how to move with it, as if the knowledge is ingrained into his bones. Steve tries not to think too hard about what that means.

He takes a breath as he reaches the base of the hill at the border of the campgrounds. His whole world is being turned on its head, and he can’t just let himself get caught up in all this. There are gods and there are monsters, and there are kids going out to die, and Steve’s the only who seems to think there’s something wrong with that. He doesn’t care who his dad is. He doesn’t care about some nebulous divine heritage. He just wants to find Bucky and go home.

And that’s what he needs. A simple straight-forward goal. Steve just might be able to manage it all if he doesn’t lose sight of this.The moon is round and full in the sky, casting the lone pine in silver. As Steve gets closer to the top, he starts to make out a figure sitting on one of the lower branches. He comes to a stop under the shelter of the pine tree and looks up at the pair of legs dangling from a branch just above his head.

“You’re an idiot,” Tony says from his perch.

Steve sighs and leans up against the rough bark of the tree. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, you know, went out for a midnight stroll, thought I’d stop by and see the resident martyr go off to get himself killed.” He leans forward, nodding his head at the shield on Steve’s arm. “Oh, _great_ choice of weaponry. Maybe the monsters are feeling frisky and they’ll play fetch with you.”

“I’m not an idiot,” Steve says.

“Could’ve fooled me.”

Steve stops for a moment to really look at Tony. Because no matter how flippant Tony might seem, there’s a tension stiffening his posture that’s very real. He’s genuinely angry at Steve.

“Just because—” Steve huffs out a frustrated breath as he tries to explain this. It’s not that he doesn’t know this is dangerous. Because he does know. He knows it to the very core of his being where his heart clenches and stutters with fear of what he’s about to do. Steve knows he’s probably marching off to his death, but he’s going anyway. “Just because you think it’s not worth taking the risk doesn’t mean I’m stupid for deciding that it _is_ worth it. Look, Bucky’s my friend, and I’ve lived with him being dead for _years_. I can’t lose him again. I’m probably going to die, but at least, I’ll have done _something_.”

“That’s a pretty sentiment,” Tony drawls.

“I’m going to find Bucky.”

“Yeah, good luck with that.”

Steve sighs. He doesn’t have time to try to sort this out with Tony. And even though he knows that Tony does seem to care beneath all the prickliness, Steve just can’t stand around all day trying to make sense of him. There’s too much at stake. He shifts the shield on his arm into a more comfortable position and starts to walk down the road leading away from camp.

There’s a rustle and a loud thump behind him. “They’ve already got a questing group looking for Barnes. Even if you did go, you’d just get in their way.”

 

 

“Alright,” Steve says. “I’m going anyway.”

“You—” There’s a frustrated groan behind him, and Steve can almost see Tony waving his hands frustratedly. “Or you could stay. Staying is good.”

“Probably.”

Steve’s almost at the bottom of the hill when he hears footsteps and then a hand closes on his arm, yanking him around to face Tony. “Barnes _saved_ your life,” he hisses. “You might want to fucking respect that instead of wasting the sacrifice he made for _you_.”

“And who would I be if I didn’t return the favor?”

“Alive.”

Steve shrugs. “Half-bloods die all the time. This shouldn’t be any different.”

Tony doesn’t say anything after that. It’s almost impossible to see his face in the dark, but eventually, he just lets go of Steve’s arm. Steve watches him take a step back, then another and another until he’s walking back into camp grounds. He sighs and starts down the road again. It’s a long way to go to get from Montauk into the city itself. He can probably catch a couple rides once he hits a town, but that still means he’s got quite a few miles to walk to get there.

The gravel crunches under his feet. A night bird calls somewhere in the underbrush. It’s a peaceful night, and Steve keeps walking.

 

* * *

 

Just when the sky is starting to turn from black to grey, a pair of headlights appears on the horizon behind him. There’ve been a few cars that have passed by him before, and he’s tried to wave down each one, but none of them’ve stopped so far. Steve holds up an arm and watches as the car slows down. The window rolls down.

“I maintain the position that this is a terrible idea,” Tony says from the drivers seat.

Steve smiles. “But you’ll help me anyway.”

“Gods know why,” Tony grumbles.

Steve gets inside, tosses the shield in the backseat, and they set off. As it turns out, it’s the car Tony had hijacked two days ago. The silence isn’t comfortable per se, but neither of them seem particularly interested in breaking it. The sun is rising behind them, spreading pinks and oranges onto the landscape around them. Steve watches the trees pass.

“You know who my dad is,” he says.

The car jerks a little when Tony’s hand tenses on the wheel. His face is the picture of studied indifference. “And how would I know that?”

“Because you’ve been talking about the statistical probabilities of just about everything, and it would be ridiculous if you hadn’t already identified common signifiers for kids in every cabin.”

“Well, you’re not wrong about that,” Tony mutters. “I was the first to call Barnes’s parent. Everyone thought he was an Ares kid.”

Steve frowns. “Because he was good at fighting?”

“Because he was powerful,” Tony says quietly, his face somber. “Because he endured what no one else could.” He stares out the window, his mind a thousand miles away. “Ares is war, but he is also strength—survival in the face of horror beyond imagination.”

Steve shudders. There’d been so many dark hints as to what had happened to Bucky. And the idea that Bucky had been alive but suffering through something no person should ever have to go through—it makes him feel sick. And he very well could be going through all of that again now. Steve stares at the empty stretch of road in front of them.

“You haven’t asked,” Tony comments.

“What?”

“Your dad. You haven’t asked me who I think he is.”

Steve shrugs. “I told you. I don’t really want to know. It’s always been just me and my mom, and we’ve been just fine without him. It feels wrong to just have him show up again fifteen years later.”

“Most people do care,” Tony says. “They care a lot. They spend years wondering and waiting, and now they finally know.”

“Is it worth it?”

Tony blows out a breath. “I don’t know.”

“I don’t think it is,” Steve says quietly. “I’d rather have a dad that was present than one who was a god. Even if I do inherit magical powers from him.”

Tony rubs his face, suddenly looking exhausted. “Honestly, you’re probably right. They’re gods, they don’t exactly pitch in to child support.”

“Tony Stark admitting that I’m right. What has the world come to?”

“Yeah, well, don’t get used to it.”

There’s a slump in Tony’s shoulders like he isn’t really thinking about the conversation anymore. Like he’s talking about something else entirely. There’s a raw emotional honesty to this whole bizarre talk, something that Steve hadn’t expected. It could be that it’s nearly 4 AM, and this is the time of not-quite morning that draws truth out of people. The quiet and the close darkness of night are a lot like confessional booths.

But more likely, Steve thinks, Tony is telling him all this because he believes Steve is going to die. A last comfort for the dead man walking, and he’ll take this knowledge to the grave with him. Tony’s already weighed the probabilities. It’s a safe bet for him, probably close to a guarantee.

Steve lets his head rest against the cool glass of the window. “What happened to you, Tony?” he murmurs, not really expecting an answer. Gallows honesty can only really go so far.

“You think you don’t care,” Tony says instead of answering, “but you do. I mean, it’s your _dad_. There’s always been a part of you that’s wanted to know. Maybe you wanted to make him proud, maybe you just want him to fucking acknowledge that you even exist.” He inhales a little shakily. “Then it’s going on two years and he still hasn’t claimed you, even though you’ve known who he was since the start. And you’re not even the longest on record. The gods have so many other kids, so many other more _important,_ ” his mouth twists on the word, “things to care about. It’s just so _easy_ to fall through the cracks. You’re lying to yourself if you think that you don’t want to know. Because you do. You really do.”

“Alright,” Steve says. He wants nothing more than to reach out and touch Tony, to offer some small comfort, to ground him in the here and now. “Tell me then.”

“You’d think it’d be obvious. I mean, with the blond hair and the muscles and the insufferable self-righteousness, you’re like textbook classic hero. Well, maybe not the _Greek_ classic hero. Those guys had issues. And you draw monsters in worse than _Barnes_ does, which is saying something because the guy can’t ever really catch a break.”

“One of the Big Three.” Steve can almost hear something click in his brain. A few things start to make a hell of a lot more sense. “You had me grab that—device? It had an electric charge, didn’t it. You handled it with those heavy rubber gloves.”

“It would’ve given you a nasty shock when you first picked it up, but it didn’t so I had you try plug it in. It would’ve had to be at lethal levels of electricity in order to activate the prosthetic.”

" _Seriously?_ "

"Don't get your panties in a twist. The first shock wouldn't have killed you."

"Yeah, that makes me feel so much better. The second one would."

"I wouldn't have made you hold it if you reacted to the first one," Tony grumbles.

"Somehow I still don't find that reassuring."

"Well, hey, now we know who dear ol' dad is, so in the end, I was doing you a favor. Just don't expect him to claim you or anything because that's probably never going to happen."

"Careful, you might give a guy daddy issues," Steve says dryly.

Tony snorts. "Like you didn't have them already. They're handing those out like candy these days."

"Really? I hadn't noticed with you being the poster boy of functional coping mechanisms."

Tony laughs. "Fucked up, isn't it?"

"It kinda is." Steve pauses, another thought occurring to him. "So why don't you think Zeus is going to claim me as his kid?"

“I mean, he’d be an idiot if he did. For the longest time, everyone thought Hades broke the pact first because of Barnes. Zeus got a lot of leverage against him thanks to that, but with you in the picture, he loses that. Don’t go into this thinking he might save you because he won’t.”

"Yeah, I know," Steve says. "Y'know you're being awfully straight with me."

Tony smirks and opens his mouth. "Actually—” then he seems to think better of it and trails off. "I mean, you basically have about a 96% probability of failing entirely. Your chances of seeing this through are so exceedingly low, I might as well be honest."

"You totally pulled that number out your ass."

"Lies and slander."

"I should get myself almost killed more often," Steve comments lightly.

The car jerks violently as Tony steps on the brakes before quickly taking it off. They coast for a while on the side of the road until they slow to a complete stop. Tony's breathing hard, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. "Sorry," he manages to gasp out. "That's not really a laughing matter. You don't know how many—

"I can guess," Steve says, and this time he does reach out to clasp a hand on Tony's shoulder. "I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking."

"I don't think you can guess. We see too many heroes. They pass through, they quest, they challenge powers greater than themselves, they die. And in the end, you realize that none of us are really heroes or martyrs. We're cannon fodder in someone else's war."

"Is that why you're helping me?" Steve asks quietly. "Because I'm not fighting the gods' war?"

Tony pushes his hands through his hair, messing it up so that it sticks out all over the place. He looks exhausted, but he musters a small smile for Steve. "That makes it all sound so noble. I do have ulterior motives."

"Imagine that."

Tony leans over the stick shift. Steve catches a glimpse of his face up close, the thin lines worn into his face, the stubble on his chin, the thick dark lashes coming down over his eyes. Then a warm mouth presses against his own. He goes still. After a long moment, Tony leans back and starts the engine again. "Your imagination is too limited," he says.

“I—”Steve clears his throat. "I guess it is."

They pull back onto the road in silence. Steve watches the side of Tony's neck slowly go splotchy and red, the color traveling up to his ears.

"It's not really a big deal," Tony says. "It's just, I thought—well, you should know. We're gonna be stuck together for a while because who knows how long it'll take to find Barnes, and—"

"You don't have to explain yourself." Steve reaches out again to rest his hand just above the back of Tony's shirt collar, feels the heat of skin under his palm. Some of the tension unwinds out of Tony's muscles at the reassuring contact. There's a quiet exhale.

They round a bend in the round, and Steve can see the lights of New York City shining in the distance. For the first time, he starts to think maybe they'll be okay after all.

**Author's Note:**

> A lot of Tony's improvised weapons were pulled from this [Youtube channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC42VsoDtra5hMiXZSsD6eGg/featured) and this [book](https://archive.org/details/100deaskitheseaopeguitoelupurevacapandsuranydansit). Great resources for the 'I swear to God I'm not a murderer, I'm just a writer' person.
> 
> Give me a shout on my [tumblr](http://jinlinli.tumblr.com/)! And please do follow [nikthan](http://nikthan.tumblr.com/) on his tumblr as well!


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